HeyJaredHigh Octane Leadership
Future-proof your leadership with High Octane Leadership, a place where business leaders—whether by title or aspiration—share cheat codes for unlocking workplace excellence, lessons learned along the way, and insider tips for future generations of next-level professionals.
- Indexed episodes, last 90 days
- 6
- Latest publication
- Sep 10, 2026
- Audience
- Checking…
- Earliest in this view
- Jul 16, 2026
Latest episodes
92% of Buyers Trust People, Not Companies — Are You Building the Right Brand? (opens the original)
Read excerpt
Research shows that 92% of people trust individuals over what a company says . So the real question isn't whether your company has a good reputation — it's whether you do. In this episode, Donald Thompson is joined by Jackie Ferguson and Bob Batchelor for a deep-dive conversation on why thought leadership is a business strategy, not a content calendar. They cover what it actually costs to wait, how to build trust before you ask for the order, and why the executives who earn the rooms they want d
The University of Michigan Just Lowered the Bar. The Real World Didn't. (opens the original)
Read excerpt
The University of Michigan recently announced it would go pass-fail for freshmen and remove SAT and ACT requirements, all in the name of protecting mental health. Donald Thompson isn't buying it. In this 11-minute segment, Donald makes the case that lowering academic standards doesn't protect young people — it underprepares them. The business world doesn't go pass-fail. Pressure is the curriculum. Failure is how you build a career. And the generation coming out the other side of these policies i
Winning in Public, Breaking in Private: Lacey Newman on Burnout, Boundaries, and Building a Business That Doesn't Break You (opens the original)
Read excerpt
You built something successful. And it almost cost you everything. Lacey Newman spent 20 years building a luxury real estate team that crossed $1 billion in sales. She was the go-to agent in Nashville, had a team that ran like clockwork, and checked every box on paper. Then she walked away — on purpose, at the peak — because she realized being successful at something and being meant for it are two very different things. In this episode, Donald Thompson sits down with Lacey to unpack the real cos
Your Best Employees are Quitting Quietly - Warning Signs You Can't Ignore (opens the original)
Read excerpt
Business right now is loud. AI disruption, declining trust, employees going quiet, leaders buried in meetings that don't move anything forward. Donald Thompson isn't trying to cover all of it. For 2026, he's narrowed his focus to four things: leadership excellence, employee engagement, AI in the human workforce, and trust-based brand authority. On this episode of High Octane Leadership, Don hands guest host Jackie Ferguson — two-time founder, best-selling author of The Inclusive Language Handboo
Will Gen-AI Destroy Thought Leadership? (opens the original)
Read excerpt
Eight out of ten buyers say thought leadership shapes the decisions they make. Only six out of ten companies think thought leadership is critical to winning that business. That twenty-point gap is the starting point for Bob Buday’s conversation with Donald Thompson on this episode of High Octane Leadership — and it’s also the reason Bob thinks the rise of generative AI is such high stakes for the profession he helped invent. Bob isn’t a recent arrival to this conversation. In 1987, he was on the
Publishing over time
Last 90 days. Choose a month to open its work.
Recurring subjects
Named in the text we hold. One piece can cover several.
Audience
No verified audience measurement yet.
About this data
Counts cover the work we have indexed. Tone needs enough text and a confident classification. Excerpts and episode notes are not full articles or transcripts.
Identity or attribution wrong? Suggest a correction.